huaniTzin RecenTeRs The ciTy • 113great market with its selection of foodstuffs and goods was
found. The Santiago Tlatelolco market would also have
been a draw, particularly for those coming into the city
from the north. In addition, the presence of San José de
los Naturales and Santiago Tlatelolco, the city’s two indig-
enous parishes, ensured that city residents were obliged to
come there on Sundays and feast days as well.
Set in the indigenous nerve center of the city, this tecpan
would have served as a billboard for the image of indig-
enous rulership. Two native accounts from the second
half of the sixteenth century mention how the building
featured a large banner showing a tlatocamecayotl, a list of
the city’s indigenous rulers, from Tenochtitlan’s founders
to the present, and at the base of this genealogy was the
nopal cactus. 53 “Appreciated by all the people,” the banner
undoubtedly was set on the complex’s outside wall. 54 Such
a public image certainly underscored the historical legiti-
macy of the building’s current resident, and the autoch-
thonous nopal cactus recalled the deity Huitzilopochtli’s
command to found the city, and thus trafficked in the kind
of public imagery that pre-Hispanic Mexica rulers had
developed. It also connected the ruler’s authority to this
spot in the city, and after 1563 its façade seemed to offer a
subtle riposte to the other royal palace within the city, this
one occupied by the viceroy (see figure 4.3). This other
palace was built like a fortress to protect it from a hostile
public, and on its façade was written the name of a distant
king, one who never set foot in his New World domains. 55
concLusion
While Huanitzin’s reign was brief, he established a tem-
plate to which other successful indigenous rulers of the
city would adhere. The first element was acceptance of
Christianity, seen in the orthodox imagery of The Mass of
Saint Gregory that occupies the central field of the feath-
erwork. The work’s frame, linking his name to that of
Pedro de Gante, testifies to his successful alliance with the
city’s Franciscans. Secondly, in possessing his own exalted
pedigree, Huanitzin also behaved like a traditional Mexica
ruler, likely wearing the garb of office that had signaled the
divine election of his forebears. Within the city, he would
have needed to marshal indigenous labor for new public-
works projects, like the tecpan, and the builders of this
Mexica palace drew on a symbolic architectural vocabu-
lary that underscored indigenous authority. And in sending
extravagant (and perhaps humbling) gifts to the pope that
featured wholly orthodox iconography, he set the city into
a Christian, global network.
Underwriting Huanitzin’s success, and kept to the side-
lines through most of this chapter, was his alliance with
the Franciscans, these brown-robed friars who arrived
soon after the Conquest. After an initial three came, in
1524 a larger and more famous group of twelve Franciscans
arrived, in number and aspiration mirroring Christ’s first
apostles. When Cortés welcomed the larger group into the
city in June of 1524, the powerful conquistador fell to his
knees, this act of submission making an impression on the
assembled indigenous elites. 56 He then granted the friars
a prime piece of real estate on the northeast corner of the
Plaza Mayor, right on the ruins of the dismantled Templo
Mayor. As a result of Cortés’s favor, the Franciscans came
to early dominance in the city as they quickly assumed the
massive project of evangelization; in the years following
them, the Dominicans and Augustinians would arrive,
but their influence in the city’s indigenous quarters was
never as great.
By the end of May 1525, the Franciscans had abandoned
their granted seat on the Plaza Mayor and moved to Mo yo-
tlan in the city’s southwest, an area that Spaniard residents
perceived at that moment as marginal and dangerous, but
that would emerge as the nerve center of the indigenous
city. 57 Keen political strategists, the Franciscans allied
variously with the royal government and sometimes even
with Cortés’s heirs. Wherever they moved with the politi-
cal currents, the Franciscans were often crucial supporters
of the indigenous government as it pushed back against
the ever-encroaching Spanish cabildo and non-Franciscan
archbishops.
From their seat in the monastery of San Francisco, built
a few blocks to the north of the tecpan, they would join
with the city’s indigenous residents in establishing a city of
both mortar and metaphor. Like the indigenous elite, they
would take up the charge to imagine Tenochtitlan anew,
and they would link it to Rome, the city of Christian origin,
and in this would follow the pattern of the city’s Mexica
founders, who had once created an idealized Tenochtitlan
as the new Aztlan. Living in the monastery of San Fran-
cisco during these early decades following the Conquest
was the friar named on the left margin of the featherwork
frame, Pedro de Gante, founder of the great school of San
José de los Naturales within San Francisco. He was a key
figure in the development of the post-Conquest city, and
we will turn to the Franciscan project in the next chapter.